Day two is over, and now it’s time to get yourself ready for the third and final day of the QCon New York 2016 (#qconnewyork) tracks. But with so many sessions to choose from again, where do you go? Assuming you don’t have a schedule set in mind, here are my session picks for QCon NY, day three.

Be sure to view the full schedule and explore all your options, but these are the sessions that really stick out to me as either potentially very educational or simply just interesting.

10:35am, Dumbo/Navy Yard

Want to get fired up for your third day of QCon? I think this talk might be a way to do it.

Cory House, software architect at VinSolutions, will be talking about how to transform from an “average” developer into an “outlier” developer. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but part of it is about increasing your paycheck. That’s a good enough reason to go, right?

One piece of House’s upcoming talk that stands out to me is his discussion of increasing your “luck surface area.” What this pretty much comes down to is shameless self-promotion of your development skills — be it C#, JavaScript, SQL or whatever — in order to not only increase the chance that you’ll get props for your skills, but that you’ll make yourself available to those that need your help.

“So many of us don’t think about the fact that we have to be deliberate about self-promotion and that it’s not necessarily selfish,” House said in an interview with QCon reps. “If no one knows what we were good at, what are the chances that anyone else is going to get to benefit from our skill set?”

11:50am, Salon D

There’s a lot of hype out there when it comes to microservices. So it’s time for a solid, down-to-earth discussion about what you can expect when you’re expecting the introduction of microservices into your environment.

Daniel Rolnick is the CTO at Yodle, and he warns that microservices is a “buzz word,” and that developers need to be careful about jumping on the band wagon without considering the consequences.

“When you start going the microservices route, people don’t always realize that there are other things that have to happen, necessarily will happen and it can quickly spiral out of control,” Rolnick said in an interview with. “Everything is built on trade-offs and you have to be willing to evolve as your systems evolve.”

1:40pm, Dumbo/Navy Yard

Did you ever think a Meyer’s Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment could help you build a better development team? Well, in this session, you’ll find out how it can.

Heather Fleming, VP of product and program management at GILT, will share the framework they use to build productive teams — something they call a “team ingredients” framework — and how empathy with other team members plays a vital role in cultivating a “psychologically safe environment.”

If years of coding have hardened developers’ hearts, maybe Heather can help soften them.

2:55pm, Salon D

This is a true “monolith to microservices” story. Emily Reinhold, a software engineer on Uber’s Money team, is going to share with audience members the lessons they learned breaking up their huge, Python-based monolith into new microservices. This includes not only what they did right, but what they could have done better — including aligning with consumers.

While I’ve traditionally produced content that advises against large migrations to microservices and encourages small iterations, it’s still fun to watch David(s) take on Goliath.

4:10pm, Salon D

I know, I’m overdoing it on the microservices here…oh well.

Assuming Daniel Rolnick didn’t convince you to turn away from microservices, you need to understand what not to do when building those microservices. Here you’re going to learn about “some of the nastiest antipatterns in microservices” and how to take those antipatterns down before they ruin your project.

I have to give a shout out to the speaker Daniel Bryant on this one. I’ve had the chance to sit in on sessions of his before and chat with him one-on-one, and I can say that you always learn something new talking to Daniel.

5:25pm, Salon A/B

Can JavaScript survive in space? Let’s find out.

Dan Harden is the lead front-end engineer at Zappos, and he will explain how a group of hackers tested how high they could go with JavaScript — literally — by using it to gather data via a camera-equipped weather balloon and answer the question: “Can we take a picture of earth from near space?”

Dan will also explain how this project also led to the creation of Nyanpollo, show us the practical difficulties of interfacing with hardware and share videos of and data captured from the mission.

It’s time to boldly go where no JavaScript has gone before.

And now you can go to the reception, mingle and watch the screening of Blade Runner.

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